As described in the Introduction, L.J. Nicoletti incorporates what may be read as a Blairian framework in her creation of an assignment geared toward helping her first-year writing students cope with the events of September 11th and respond to the types of memorialization they were witnessing in the mass media. Again, while this is not necessarily a book about public memory, Nicoletti aptly points out that to uncover the arguments built into commemorative sculptures or monuments may also make us more attuned to the ideological agendas often perpetuated through particular renderings or portrayals of politicized events (53). Similarly, Barbara Biesecker writes that “claiming and representing the past is far from being an innocent affair” (“Remembering” 168). As Biesecker’s important analysis of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial (WIMS) demonstrates, a memorial’s ostensible goals may differ from its more subtle rhetorical work. On the surface, for example, the WIMS appeared to acknowledge the millions of women who have served in the U.S. military since the Revolutionary War (Biesecker 165). As a critical analysis of the memorial reveals, however, the memorial’s revisionist history served to alienate the women whom it was intended to valorize. Within the WIMS, an exhibit gallery that should have promoted the accomplishments of individual women soldiers functions more generally to “mark the regular rhythms and daily practices of our nation’s service women” (166). As a result, she writes, “typicality rather than rarity subtends the order of things” (166). Consequently, these artifacts have the effect of problematically implying a representative, universalizing narrative, perpetuating a “seemingly complete, unabridged history of women in the U.S. armed services” (166). Instead, Biesecker calls for something akin to a multimodal rhetorical approach characterized more so by its ability to foster embodied knowledge. A material rhetoric approach indeed makes room for the contextualized nuances of multimodal, embodied experience that influence the cultural moments in which we interact with rhetorical artifacts.
Barbara Dickson and Dan Brouwer each consider the ways in which material and visual rhetorics function within the contexts of the mass media and the public, though their objects of analysis are less concerned with public memory and national identity than with the processes that make possible specific representations of the body in popular culture. Brouwer examines the sociocultural contexts that inform the practice of wearing HIV/AIDS tattoos. Considered a form of “self-stigmatization,” the practice of wearing the tattoo is “a particular communicative and performative strategy grounded in visibility politics and practiced in the context of AIDS activism” (Brouwer 206). Noting its precariousness as a social act, Brouwer writes that the tattoo “simultaneously disrupts expectations of the appearance of health and challenges ‘norms’ of patient behavior, yet [. . .] also invites surveillance [. . .] and runs the risk of reducing the wearer’s identity to ‘disease carrier’” (206). Brouwer’s rich analysis not only illuminates the motivations behind this powerful social practice but also provides a more empowered and “sensitive understanding of the communication practices of marginal or stigmatized social groups” by understanding how “performative communication” illustrates the connections “between the margins and center of power” (217–218). Also focused on the sociocultural contexts that allow for resistance through bodily inscription, Dickson analyzes the iconic 1991 Vanity Fair cover photo of actor Demi Moore, which depicted her “seven months pregnant and wearing nothing but diamonds” (297). Dickson questions whether the representation of Moore’s pregnant body can be seen as “liberat[ing] the feminine body,” as Moore claimed it did in her description of the photo as a “feminist statement” (297). Dickson understands the photo as a “textual event” and considers the cultural contexts that shape its “production and reception” (299). A material rhetorical analysis of these “bodily, visual, and textual” inscriptions allows Dickson to better understand the hegemonic discourses that inform bodily inscription and how such inscriptions get instantiated materially (311–312).
Building on Blair and Dickson’s approaches and giving more equal treatment to spatial analysis and the impact of physical space on the body, Mary Lay Schuster’s material rhetorical analysis of Baby Haven, a free-standing birth center in middle America, describes the consequences of the center on the minds and bodies of clients who come there seeking an “ideal birth,” or one that resists “the construction of their pregnant bodies as risky entities best managed by medical experts” (3). Schuster describes Baby Haven as a rhetorically powerful space that allows clients to “rewrite cultural inscriptions” that construct the body, in order to forward an understanding of the birthing process that works against the hegemonic biomedical model (30). Also affording more equal treatment to physical space and its impact on bodies, but discussing in addition the material component of textual artifacts, Christina Haas analyzes the work of a Permanent Injunction posted on the front door of an Ohio abortion clinic. The Injunction is meant to deter abortion protesters and create a safe space for women who seek to have an abortion performed (Crowley 359). Haas describes the Injunction in terms of its material rhetorical and cultural dimensions, but frames the document more so as a mediating device that helps to make tangible the “conceptual distinction between public and private” (234). Through its articulation of spatial boundaries that clarify where protests may be staged, the Injunction acts on the bodies within and outside of the abortion clinic to protect the employees of the clinic, thus fostering a better sense of safety among clinic workers (224).
Multimodality as a Component of Materiality
In addition to material rhetoric’s focus on physical space and the built environment, fields related to composition and media studies have begun to acknowledge the materiality of multimodal texts and digital artifacts. Hayles, for example, argues for a multimodal, material literacy in her keynote address at the 2002 Computers and Writing Conference. While the recent focus on visual rhetoric is a clear step in the right direction, she says, “we need to develop modes of critical attention responsive to the full range of [. . .] signifying elements in electronic work, including animation, sound, graphics, screen design, and navigational functionalities” (“Deeper” 371). In acknowledging that our vocabulary for analyzing printed text is insufficient for the critique of digital texts, Hayles broaches the intersections of digital texts and materiality (373). To this end, she first notes that electronic texts require a “critical language” sensitive to the interplay of word and image; she then sees this interplay as indicative of larger issues related to the broader practices of multimodality: “This new critical vocabulary,” she says, “will further realize that navigation, animation, and other digital effects are not neutral devices but designed practices that enter deeply into the work’s structures; it will eschew the print-centric assumption that a literacy work is an abstract verbal construction and focus on the materiality of the medium” (373). Aligned with Hayles, Barbara Warnick notes that “the material form of a representation is an intrinsic dimension of the user’s experience of it, and so critical approaches need to take into account the materiality of the text, as well as its content and style of expression” (328). The GPS, as I will describe in chapter four, is one example of a multimodal, material artifact that not only epitomizes the variety of content, contexts, and styles of expression that the text may produce